Forget the blurbs, they are less than worthless. Even the glowing reviewswill soon be forgotten. Awards are no better indicator—half of the writershonored with the Nobel Prize in literature are forgotten and out-of-printnowadays.

Here’s the truest test. Wait until ten years after their death, and see ifanyone still talks about their books.

You need a decade for the hype to dissipate, for the eulogies to fade fromreaders’ memories. Class reading lists have now been updated. The oldbook reviewers have been replaced. No publicist or agent is working theroom. The chatter at fashionable cocktail parties has moved on to otherbooks. Only a great author can still hold readers after a decade’s absence.

And what does this measure tell us? Well, Saul Bellow (died in 2005) hasclearly fallen from grace. Even a centenary celebration and publication ofthe first volume of a major biography couldn’t hide the defensive tone ofBellow’s advocates. When Bellow’s name is mentioned nowadays, it is asoften to dismiss or criticize as to praise. I question the fairness of this turn-of-events—I rank Bellow as one of finest authors of his generation—butcan't deny that his reputation has taken a huge hit.

On the other hand, Kurt Vonnegut (died 2007) will certainly survive the ten-year-test. He is not only read and quoted, but is still treated as an iconicfigure of the counterculture. The same can certainly be said of David FosterWallace (died 2008), whose reputation and admirers seem to grow witheach passing year. I suspect that the tenth anniversary of his death willserve more as a kind of canonization of a saint than a reevaluation of a writer.In sharp contrast, Norman Mailer (died 2007) already seems like an old-fashioned figure from the distant past, an author who may still garner somerecognition among the general public, but won’t find many readers underthe age of forty.

Which brings us to the sad case of John Fowles. We have now arrived atthe tenth anniversary of his death (on November 5, 2005). My localbookstore has none of his novels in stock, and some of his classic worksare now out-of-print. He is, by my reckoning, one of the greatest writers ofthe 20th century, but I fear that he is badly failing the ten-year test.

What a change from 1969, when John Fowles was at the top of the literaryworld. His novel The French Lieutenant's Woman was already in its thirdprinting even before Fowles finished his publicity tour of the US. It wouldstay on top of the bestseller list for more than a year. Fowles found himselfbooked on back-to-back TV shows, basking in a degree of pop culturefame that one could hardly imagine any novelist receiving nowadays, letalone a middle-aged white British male educated at Oxford and fond ofpostmodern narrative techniques.

Fowles's best works still dazzle. And they seem just as strange andwondrous now as when they were published. When Fowles’s The Magusarrived in bookstores almost exactly a half-century ago, its first readersmust have shaken their heads in amazement. How could you describe anovel that was so different from every other book on the shelves? Thesekinds of characters, situations and plot complication simply didn’t exist inother tales—it was almost as if Fowles had mapped a hidden world that noone had previously visited. But that’s still true today, and perhaps the mostimpressive testimony to his achievement is that this author’s finest worksstill defy categorization.

Take a look at his final novel, A Maggot—if you can find a copy, that is.(This book is out-of-print except in digital form.) Try to determine what kindof novel it is. After fifty pages, you will be convinced that it is a historicalnovel about early 18th century Britain class relationships and moralattitudes. But one hundred pages later, you will have changed your mind,and believe you are reading a murder mystery. But soon after you willsuspect that A Maggot is actually a work of magical realism. But in anotherhundred pages, you will start wondering whether John Fowles has reallywritten a science fiction novel set in 1736. But a short while later, you willfind that you are reading a work of religious fiction—or are you? Why wouldJohn Fowles, atheist and free thinker, be taking you on just this particularpath?

The whole book hold together marvelously, and you will be caught up bothby the postmodern techniques and the sheer bravado of the storytelling. Butyou won’t be able to classify it, let alone provide a brief summary of itscontents. It is too rich and varied for synopsis. You must experience itwhole, or not at all.

The same kind of category-breaking vision informs The French Lieutenant’sWoman. At first glance, this book seems to emulate the long, ramblingVictorian novels of Thackeray, Dickens, Eliot and Hardy. But Fowles takesthe basic formulas of the nineteenth century and reinvents them with the fullarsenal of twentieth century literary techniques. Here the reader encountersmeta-narrative, gender politics, post-Freudian psychoanalysis, existentialquestionings, sociological analysis, and various postmodern structuralshifts (including two conflicting endings to the story). Yet Fowles embeds allof this into a sexually-charged love story that probably would have soldloads of copies merely on the merits of its appeal to fans of romance tales. By any measure, the novel is tour de force. And though it has inspired laterworks (see, for example, A.S. Byatt’s Possession), there is still no othernovel that quite captures the peculiar flavor of The French Lieutenant’sWoman.

I am hardly surprised that Fowles doubted that the book could be made intoa movie. He was wrong on that count. Not only did The French Lieutenant'sWoman serve as the basis for 1981 film, but garnered five Oscarnominations (including the first of fifteen Best Actress nominations for MerylStreep). But to pull off this shift to the silver screen, scriptwriter HaroldPinter had to make significant changes to the meta-narrative.

In truth, Fowles has been poorly served by Hollywood. (But he got hisrevenge with his 1977 novel Daniel Martin, which offers up many causticobservations on the cultural impact of movie moguls and their minions.) The Magus ranks among the most brilliant novels of the 1960s, but the filmversion was a disaster. Woody Allen famously quipped that, if he got to livehis life over again, he would do "everything exactly the same, with theexception of watching The Magus." According to actor Michael Caine, eventhe cast failed to understand the story. Yet the fault here does not reside inthe book, but in the disastrous decision to turn it into a movie of less thantwo hours. The Magus has more surprising plot twists than almost any bookI’ve ever read. Every thirty pages, more or less, something transpires thatforces the reader to reassess everything they have learned in previouschapters. I suspect that it could be turned into an absolutely compelling mini-series if told over the course of 10 or 20 hours. Imagine Lost on steroids.But the story cannot survive compression into the standard length for afeature film. Director Guy Green shouldn’t even have made the attempt.

Fowles, like so many of the sensations of the 1960s and 1970s, never quiteachieved the same level of fame in the final decades of his life. But hedeserves almost all of the blame for his subsequent disappearance fromthe limelight. Instead of seizing the opportunities presented by The FrenchLieutenant’s Woman, he seemed almost determined to retreat from hisnew-found celebrity. He hid from high society, and rarely met with otherwriters. He turned down numerous offers, almost as a matter of course. Heeven followed up the extraordinary success of his US book tour by writing along essay, “America I Weep for Thee,” that was almost custom-made toalienate many of his new-found fans. Other projects—assorted poems, anarticle on cricket for Sports Illustrated, reviews of nature books—wereequally unlikely to generate much interest. Five years would elapse beforehe would publish a significant work of fiction, and even this was merelycollection of short stories.

Fowles wouldn’t release another novel until Daniel Martin in 1977. This is asmart, substantial book, and critics (at least those in the United States)received it as a major book by an important writer. John Gardner, writing inSaturday Review, claimed that Fowles deserved comparison with LeoTolstoy and Henry James. William Pritchard, review Daniel Martin for TheNew York Times called it Fowles’s "best piece of work to date."

Sales didn’t approach the levels achieved by The French Lieutenant’sWoman. But Fowles hardly had to worry about money at this stage. Duringone amazing week in February 1977, he received almost a half milliondollars in film rights and a book advance. Given this state of affairs, somereaders might find the scorn for Hollywood in Daniel Martin as a bit ofhypocrisy. But, to Fowles’s credit, he would have little to do with theentertainment industry in subsequent years. He lived a quiet life in LymeRegis in West Dorset, where he served as curator for a local museum. Hewrote letters to the editor of the town’s newspaper, and embraced causesthat had little to do with literature or culture—complaining about a localsewage treatment plant or giving a talk extolling the virtues amateurgeology.

Although he talked about retiring from fiction, Fowles still had more novelsin him. But the negative reception to Mantissa (1982)—which one criticeven ridiculed as an “idiotic story”—made clear that he could no longercount on an enthusiastic audience to support his literary efforts. The shift inthe public’s attitude was so marked that Fowles was surprised by thepositive response to his last published novel, A Maggot from 1985. ButFowles, now a committed recluse, could hardly enjoy the success. Hedescribed the publicity tour of the US as “a bad dream…the people unrealand myself most unreal by now.”

Fowles would live another twenty years, but many readers may well haveassumed that he was already dead. At an age when most authors are stillproductive and engaged by creative pursuits. Fowles stayed mostly silent.When he died, in 2005, he was 79-years-old, but hadn’t published a majorwork since his late 50s. And even after his death, when heirs often releasea treasure trove of previously unpublished works, Fowles had little of note toshare posthumously. Who can be surprised, then, that he slipped from view,even among those who care deeply about literary matters.

Here’s a measure of Fowles’s marginalization. A few weeks ago, a bloggertook the books on Time magazine’s list of the 100 best novels of the 20thcentury, and ranked them by their Amazon sales. Fowles’s The FrenchLieutenant’s Woman placed number 97 on that tabulation—behind evensuch dauntingly reader-unfriendly authors as William Gaddis, John Barth,Theodore Dreiser, Malcolm Lowry and Flann O’Brien. If you can’t outsellThe Sot-Weed Factor you are in deep trouble. But that’s where JohnFowles’s bestselling novel finds itself in the current day.

Mr. Fowles deserves better. He anticipated so much in contemporaryfiction. He embraced feminist themes in his books to an extent that fewmale writers of his generation can match. He was deeply sensitive to theecological issues long before they had much impact on highbrow fiction.His critique of the compromises made by authors who are beguiled by thecrossover potential offered by the entertainment industry is more relevantnow than when Fowles first delivered his harsh judgments. His ability todraw on postmodern techniques without losing the gusto of his storytellingreminds me of many of the best authors of the current day.

In short, we may have forgotten John Fowles, but he still has much to tell us.I don’t blame readers. Fowles himself decided to absent himself from theliterary scene long before he died. And he often had savage criticisms tomake on even his best books. I suspect that he was ambivalent about hisfame, and perhaps felt more than a little guilty at the money he made from it.In so many ways, he laid the groundwork for his eventual fall into obscurity.

But we shouldn’t let that happen. Now that a decade has elapsed sinceFowles died, let’s take the opportunity to re-experience and re-evaluate hisbody of work. My verdict is that Fowles left behind two genuinemasterpieces—The French Lieutenant’s Woman and The Magus—andseveral other works of lasting merit. I fear they will eventually findthemselves relegated to lists of neglected classics. Fowles himself mighthave been content to see his name on such a list. But these books deserveeven more to enjoy the status of classics without the neglect.

Ten years after his death in November 2005, novelist JohnFowles is an almost forgotten figure. His novels, once widelydiscussed and debated, are seldom read and rarely evenmentioned in current-day literary circles. I am both saddenedand surprised by this state of affairs. I believe that John Fowlesranks among the half-dozen finest novelists of his generation,and his books still have much to teach us. With the goal ofspurring more interest in this seminal figure in 20th centuryliterature, I am commemorating the 10th anniversary ofFowles's death by publishing 5 online essays on his work.Ted Gioia